Full Description
From Popular Medicine to Medical Populism presents the history of medical practice in Costa Rica from the late colonial era—when none of the fifty thousand inhabitants had access to a titled physician, pharmacist, or midwife—to the 1940s, when the figure of the qualified medical doctor was part of everyday life for many of Costa Rica's nearly one million citizens. It is the first book to chronicle the history of all healers, both professional and popular, in a Latin American country during the national period.
Steven Palmer breaks with the view of popular and professional medicine as polar opposites—where popular medicine is seen as representative of the authentic local community and as synonymous with oral tradition and religious and magical beliefs and professional medicine as advancing neocolonial interests through the work of secular, trained academicians. Arguing that there was significant and formative overlap between these two forms of medicine, Palmer shows that the relationship between practitioners of each was marked by coexistence, complementarity, and dialogue as often as it was by rivalry. Palmer explains that while the professionalization of medical practice was intricately connected to the nation-building process, the Costa Rican state never consistently displayed an interest in suppressing the practice of popular medicine. In fact, it persistently found both tacit and explicit ways to allow untitled healers to practice. Using empirical and archival research to bring people (such as the famous healer or curandero Professor Carlos Carbell), events, and institutions (including the Rockefeller Foundation) to life, From Popular Medicine to Medical Populism demonstrates that it was through everyday acts of negotiation among agents of the state, medical professionals, and popular practitioners that the contours of Costa Rica's modern, heterogeneous health care system were established.
Contents
Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
1. Healers before Doctors 17
2. First Doctors, Licensed Empirics, and the New Politics of Practice 37
3. The Formation of a Biomedical Vanguard 67
4. Conventional Practice: New Science, Old Art, and Persistent Heterogeneity 91
5. Other Healers: Survival, Revival, and Public Endorsement 119
6. Midwives of the Republic 139
7. Hookworm Disease and the Popularization of Biomedical Practice 155
8. The Magician versus the Monopolists: The Popular Medical Eclecticism of Professor Carbell 183
9. Medical Populism: Dr. Calderon Guardia and the Foundations of Social Security 207
Conclusion 231
Notes 239
Bibliography 299
Index 319
